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Today is my father’s birthday. He and I have spent years trying to research our family history, but we always hit a dead end with my great-grandmother. We know she ran away from home as a teenager, after her widowed father remarried. We think she may have used a false name on the ship manifest when she came over. She’s a mystery.

On a whim, I decided to check out the Irish National Archives today. I hadn’t check in a few months because it was taking almost a year to get the 1911 census online. My great-grandmother was born in 1909, and all the censuses before that were lost in a fire. Only 1901 survived and it hasn’t been transcribed yet.

Well, imagine my surprise when I typed in my great-grandmother’s name and her family’s census return popped up! We now know her parents’ names and her siblings’ names! Needless to say, I have been researching on ancestry.com ever since. I am so excited! Isn’t genealogy awesome?